I have been thinking about the Tennessee Williams poem Life Story, and about how summer seems to turn the volume up on everyone. How everyone seems to be shouting all the time. Something about right now makes me so tired, soft and worn through. I keep accidentally convincing myself of things that aren't true, imagining up a cataclysm just for something to do. Everything interesting seems to be hiding below sea level right now.

Mostly, I guess, I have been thinking about Henry Miller: "I got that way from sitting beside a mirror and watching people pass; there are no climaxes in life like in mirrors. People fall in and out of the picture and you don't have to touch them."

On Sunday I walked from my house to a party. (Resolved: This summer's drink is Thug Passion. See also: Tupac, although we've amended his recipe to one part Alize to three parts champagne.) The early afternoon was already warmer than I was comfortable with, so I meandered an extra half of a flat block rather than going straight up all of the hills and found, to my surprise, an elaborate hillside garden. Just sitting there all this time, only a little off to the side of my usual route. Riotous with color.

I tried to explain when I made it to the party, but there isn't really a way to talk about how you were just shooting through space as usual until you found yourself stopped dead by something beautiful hidden in plain sight again. Plain sight is where all the best things are hidden.

Another thing I have been doing lately is eating raspberries, raspberries so ripe that they bruise and break open at a touch, staining my fingertips and lips. I didn't realize that I like raspberries until a few weeks ago, or at least I couldn't remember why I thought I didn't like them. And anyway, my general strategy is to taste whatever is in season, since soon it won't be.

My favorite part is when they have burst gently on the inside, leaving a tiny pool of bright red in the hollow at the center. If I were just a little bit smaller, I would go swimming in there.

Flushed with our brilliance we installed a kissing gate at the entrance to the swamp. Only people and nothing else going in and out through that gate, we were sure. Forgetting about all the tiny things, the squirrels and the sparrows and the smaller monsters. All the scary things aren't only the ones we can see from far away.

I've been quietly having a lot of feelings over here lately, going to bachelorette parties and board meetings and home, hearing mostly bad news and even more often no news at all. Thinking in that way I have, simultaneously too much and not at all. The other day a stack of flotsam fell off my end table and revealed a star chart I picked up last year. August is coming around again soon, and I sat for a while and tried to decide if it would be accurate again this year, and if it would be better if it weren't. I could look up the answer, I suppose, but the answer is mostly beside the point. I'd use it for navigating anyway.

Earlier this week I woke to find the top half of a torso, all twisted like a jack-in-the-box, sitting on top of my dresser, waving its arms and wagging its head. I stared and stared at it, waiting for it to do the usual thing and resolve into shapes and voids and a regular case of nighttime crazybrain, but it refused. Just kept sitting there, waving, creepy.

Fortunately, it disappeared when I turned on the light. As unnerving as the thing was in the dark, it would have been seventeen million times weirder in the light.

I have been reading the letters of Henry Miller and Anais Nin. In one of the letters, during the early times when they mix love and books and before anything has had a chance to go wrong, she mentions the legend of the quena. Of all the tales that there are, one in which a person makes a flute from the leg bone of their dead loved one is maybe not the sweetest, but there is something about making music from such an unexpected place that makes sense. They say that the sound of the quena is sad, although probably not for the reasons we would expect.

Icebergs are like icebergs, we know for sure, but then so are people like icebergs. These are the waters I am unsure how to navigate, how to keep from crashing in to all the secrets we keep down in the cold and the dark. Good secrets and bad secrets, and all of them keeping quiet until a warmer current happens by and melts them a little.

The trouble with being icebergs is tripping over our own submerged outcroppings. That's the thing about ice, how it keeps everything locked up in layers and bulges. No matter how far forward we try to move, it's never quite far enough to get past what we're bringing along with us.

I always forget how much I love fireworks until the hours leading up to them, but they're pretty much the greatest thing in the world. We threw a party and put it on the internet like total nerds, but as usual all the best parts are missing. And then I walked home through streets filled with merriment and alcohol and the husks of firecrackers, in an evening warm enough to not really need my jacket.

This is the best part of all of this--all the magic to be found in our skies.